PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Test 39 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) on AWS with an Oracle database on Amazon RDS for Oracle. The database is experiencing performance degradation during month-end closing. The operations team needs to identify the top SQL statements causing high read I/O. Which AWS tool should they use to analyze the database workload?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Amazon RDS Performance Insights. Amazon RDS Performance Insights is specifically designed to monitor and troubleshoot database performance. It provides detailed metrics on SQL statements, wait events, and load, making it the ideal tool to identify high read I/O queries during month-end closing. The other services focus on API auditing, log analysis, or application tracing, not database workload analysis.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights

Answer

AWS X-Ray

Question 2

A company operates SAP S/4HANA on AWS with SAP HANA System Replication between two Availability Zones. During a planned operating system patching window, the administrator must patch the secondary HANA host and then the primary host while keeping the replication relationship healthy. Which sequence of operations should the administrator perform?

Accepted Answer

Patch the secondary host while replication is active, then perform a takeover so the secondary becomes primary, patch the former primary, and re-register it as the new secondary.. Rolling maintenance in an SAP HANA System Replication landscape always begins with the node that is not serving production traffic. Patching the standby, taking over so it becomes primary, patching the former primary, and then re-registering it as the new standby preserves a live production node throughout and keeps the replication relationship correctly oriented after the window.

Answer

Stop both HANA instances, patch both hosts, restart the primary, and let SAP HANA System Replication automatically resynchronize the secondary in delta mode.

Answer

Patch the primary host first, then perform a takeover on the secondary, and finally re-register the original primary as the new secondary.

Answer

Suspend SAP HANA System Replication, patch both hosts, then resume replication and run a full data backup on the primary.

Question 3

A company runs SAP HANA on an EC2 instance with 2 TB of memory. The operations team must be able to recover the HANA database to any point within the last 15 minutes after a logical corruption, and the RPO must be 15 minutes. The current setup takes a full data backup nightly and does not back up HANA redo logs. What should be implemented to meet the RPO requirement?

Accepted Answer

Enable automatic log backup in SAP HANA so redo log segments are written to the backup destination, and use AWS Backint Agent or a supported S3 destination to store them.. Meeting a 15-minute RPO for logical corruption requires the HANA redo log chain, which only automatic log backup provides. Data backups alone restore only to their creation time. EBS snapshots are crash-consistent and lack log granularity, and system replication copies corruption rather than protecting against it. Combining data backups with continuous log backups to Amazon S3 via AWS Backint Agent or native integration satisfies the recovery objective.

Answer

Configure SAP HANA system replication to a secondary instance in another Availability Zone and rely on replication for recovery.

Answer

Enable EBS snapshots of the HANA data and log volumes every 15 minutes using a lifecycle policy.

Answer

Increase the frequency of full data backups to every 15 minutes using AWS Backup and retain 35 generations.

Question 4

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a large number of EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. The operations team needs to ensure that all instances have the required tags for cost allocation and that any non-compliant instance is automatically stopped. Which AWS service should be used to implement this governance control?

Accepted Answer

AWS Config with a custom rule and an AWS Lambda remediation action.. AWS Config is the service for assessing, auditing, and evaluating resource configurations. By using a custom rule to check for required tags and an AWS Lambda remediation action to stop non-compliant instances, the team can automate governance. The other services do not provide continuous compliance monitoring and automatic remediation for tagging.

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor with a cost optimization check.

Answer

AWS Service Catalog with a launch constraint.

Answer

Amazon Inspector with assessment templates.

Question 5

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS and wants to improve the operational resilience of its production landscape. After a recent incident, the operations team must be able to detect and respond to an impaired application server without manual intervention, and must be able to validate that the SAP system is functionally healthy after recovery. Which TWO measures should be implemented? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms on EC2 status checks and application metrics, with Amazon SNS notifications and AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks to remediate or replace impaired instances.. Operational resilience requires both automated detection and response to impaired infrastructure and a way to confirm functional health. CloudWatch alarms with SNS and Systems Manager Automation runbooks deliver automated detection and remediation, while synthetic transaction monitoring validates that business transactions succeed after recovery. The other measures address security auditing, vulnerability scanning, or bulk command execution, none of which detect or validate the SAP application health described.

Answer

Use Amazon Inspector to continuously scan the SAP EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities and generate findings for the security team.

Answer

Enable AWS CloudTrail data events on the S3 bucket that stores SAP backups to capture object-level API activity for audit purposes.

Answer

Deploy AWS Systems Manager Agent and use AWS Systems Manager Run Command to execute SAP kernel upgrade scripts on all application servers simultaneously.

Question 6

A company runs a critical SAP ERP system on AWS with an SAP HANA database on an x1e.32xlarge instance (3.9 TB memory). The database uses Amazon EBS gp2 volumes. The operations team notices that during peak load, the EBS burst balance is frequently depleted, causing I/O latency spikes. The team wants to eliminate the burst balance issue and improve performance predictably. Which action should be taken?

Accepted Answer

Migrate the EBS volumes to io1 or io2 Block Express volumes with provisioned IOPS.. The burst balance depletion on gp2 volumes indicates that the workload requires more sustained IOPS than the burst model can provide. Migrating to io1 or io2 volumes with provisioned IOPS ensures consistent, predictable performance independent of volume size or burst credits. This is the standard recommendation for I/O-intensive SAP HANA databases on AWS.

Answer

Create a RAID 0 array of multiple gp2 volumes to aggregate IOPS and burst credits.

Answer

Enable EBS optimization on the EC2 instance to increase available bandwidth.

Answer

Increase the size of the gp2 volumes to increase baseline IOPS and burst balance.

Question 7

A company runs an SAP NetWeaver ABAP system on AWS. The security team wants to detect if any SAP application servers are launched in a non-approved AWS Region or if any security group rules are changed to allow unrestricted SSH access. They need a centralized view and automatic notification. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Config. AWS Config is designed for configuration compliance: it records resource states, evaluates them with managed or custom rules, and reports compliance centrally with SNS notifications. Trusted Advisor offers broad best-practice checks but not custom rules, GuardDuty detects threats rather than configuration drift, and CloudTrail logs API calls without evaluating compliance.

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

Amazon GuardDuty

Question 8

An operations team supports an SAP BW/4HANA system on AWS and wants to reduce the time spent correlating events when a nightly data load fails. They need a single place to view the SAP job log, the underlying EC2 system log, and the AWS API calls made by the automation that starts the load, all time-aligned for the same window. Which approach should they implement?

Accepted Answer

Stream SAP job logs, EC2 system logs, and CloudTrail events into Amazon CloudWatch Logs log groups and use CloudWatch Logs Insights to query across them by timestamp.. CloudWatch Logs Insights queries multiple log groups at once and supports timestamp-based correlation, so streaming SAP job logs, EC2 system logs, and CloudTrail events into CloudWatch Logs produces a single time-aligned view. This directly replaces the manual cross-console correlation that was slowing down diagnosis of failed nightly BW/4HANA loads.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to open a shell on each instance and manually tail the SAP and system logs during the load window.

Answer

Configure AWS CloudTrail to deliver events to an Amazon S3 bucket and require engineers to download and grep the JSON files after each failed load.

Answer

Enable AWS X-Ray tracing on the SAP application servers and analyze the resulting service map to identify the failing load step.

Question 9

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS and uses an Amazon Route 53 private hosted zone for internal DNS resolution. The SAP application servers must resolve the SAP HANA database hostname to its private IP address. The company also wants to implement a disaster recovery (DR) strategy where the HANA database can be failed over to a secondary instance in another Availability Zone, and the DNS record should automatically point to the new primary. Which Route 53 configuration should be used?

Accepted Answer

Create a Route 53 failover routing policy with a primary record pointing to the current HANA instance and a secondary record pointing to the DR instance, both with health checks.. Route 53 failover routing is designed for active-passive DR scenarios. By configuring a primary record with a health check and a secondary record, Route 53 automatically redirects DNS queries to the secondary when the primary is unhealthy. This ensures SAP application servers reconnect to the DR HANA instance without manual DNS changes, providing seamless failover.

Answer

Create a Route 53 simple routing policy with a single record containing both HANA instance IP addresses, and rely on the client to choose.

Answer

Create a Route 53 latency-based routing policy with records for both HANA instances, and use health checks to remove unhealthy records.

Answer

Create a Route 53 weighted routing policy with equal weights for both HANA instances, and rely on the application to retry on failure.

Question 10

A company runs SAP HANA on AWS and uses AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA to back up the database to Amazon S3. The backup window has grown from two hours to over six hours, and some backups fail with timeout errors. CloudWatch metrics show that the HANA backup process is writing data at a lower rate than the S3 bucket can accept. The company wants to reduce the backup duration without changing the database size. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Increase the number of parallel channels in the AWS Backint Agent configuration and ensure the S3 bucket uses a prefix structure that distributes objects across multiple partitions.. AWS Backint Agent throughput is driven by the number of parallel channels and by S3 request-rate scaling, which depends on prefix distribution. Raising channel count and spreading objects across prefixes increases concurrent uploads and shortens the backup window. Transfer Acceleration targets latency, Glacier Deep Archive is archival, and log volume changes do not affect full backup streaming throughput.

Answer

Increase the size of the HANA log volume and enable automatic log backup to reduce the amount of data written during the full backup.

Answer

Change the S3 bucket storage class to S3 Glacier Deep Archive and configure a lifecycle rule to transition objects immediately.

Answer

Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket and point the Backint Agent endpoint to the accelerated hostname.

Question 11

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a primary site in eu-west-1 and a disaster recovery (DR) site in eu-central-1. The DR strategy uses Amazon EBS snapshots copied to eu-central-1 and AMIs registered from those snapshots. During a recent DR test, the team found that the restored SAP HANA database took several hours to become operational because the EBS volumes were cold and the HANA instance had to read all data from snapshots. The team wants to reduce the time to restore the DR environment to under 30 minutes. Which TWO actions should the team take? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Pre-provision the DR EC2 instances and attach newly created EBS volumes from the snapshots before the DR test, then keep them running.. Fast snapshot restore eliminates the lazy-loading penalty by pre-warming snapshot data so that volumes created from them perform at full provisioned levels immediately. Pre-provisioning the DR instances and volumes ensures the environment is ready and warmed before a disaster. Together, these actions reduce the time for HANA to become operational. st1 volumes are unsuitable for HANA, fast snapshot restore must be enabled in the destination Region, and S3 Transfer Acceleration does not apply to EBS snapshot restores.

Answer

Use Amazon EBS snapshots with fast snapshot restore enabled in eu-west-1 and rely on cross-Region copy to preserve the pre-warmed state.

Answer

Enable Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration on the S3 bucket that stores the snapshots to speed up the restore.

Answer

Convert the HANA data volumes to Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volumes in the DR Region to lower cost.

Question 12

A company runs SAP S/4HANA on AWS with a primary application server and an additional application server for load balancing. They use AWS Systems Manager for patching and automation. After a recent kernel upgrade on the primary application server, users report intermittent logon failures. The SAP administrator needs to quickly identify whether the issue is related to the recent patch and restore service. Which TWO actions should the administrator take to diagnose and mitigate the problem? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Session Manager to open a secure shell session on the primary application server and manually inspect the SAP work process logs and operating system logs.. To diagnose the issue, the administrator needs to compare the state of both servers and inspect logs. Run Command can collect kernel and trace data from both instances efficiently, while Session Manager allows interactive log inspection on the affected server. Together they provide the necessary visibility to determine if the kernel patch caused the failures and to decide on mitigation, such as reverting the kernel or adjusting configuration.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to immediately apply the same kernel patch to the additional application server to ensure consistency.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Automation to run the AWS-ApplyPatchBaseline document on the primary application server to revert the kernel to the previous version.

Answer

Use AWS Systems Manager Compliance to check whether the primary application server is compliant with the latest patch baseline and automatically remediate any noncompliance.

Question 13

A company runs an SAP HANA database on AWS. The operations team needs to monitor the database for performance issues and receive alerts when certain thresholds are exceeded. They want to use AWS native services to collect and analyze SAP HANA metrics. Which AWS service should be used to collect custom metrics from SAP HANA and trigger alarms?

Accepted Answer

Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is the AWS service designed for monitoring and observability. It can collect custom metrics from SAP HANA using the CloudWatch agent or by publishing metrics via the AWS CLI/SDK. You can then set alarms on these metrics to alert when thresholds are breached. This provides a native AWS solution for monitoring SAP HANA and integrating with other AWS services for automated responses.

Answer

AWS Config

Answer

AWS Trusted Advisor

Answer

AWS CloudTrail

Question 14

A company runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and uses Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring. The operations team wants to receive alerts when the SAP application server's CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 10 minutes. They also want to automatically restart the application server if it becomes unresponsive. Which two actions should they take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

Create a CloudWatch alarm on the CPUUtilization metric with a threshold of 80% for 10 minutes and configure an Amazon SNS topic to notify the operations team.. To alert on CPU utilization, create a CloudWatch alarm with the specified threshold and duration, and use SNS for notifications. To automatically restart an unresponsive server, use Systems Manager Automation triggered by the alarm. These two actions together provide both alerting and remediation, meeting the requirements.

Answer

Configure AWS CloudTrail to log all API calls and create a CloudWatch alarm based on the StopInstances API call to detect unresponsive servers.

Answer

Use AWS Config to monitor the EC2 instance's configuration and trigger an AWS Lambda function to restart the instance when the configuration changes.

Answer

Enable detailed monitoring on the EC2 instance to get 1-minute metrics and create a CloudWatch alarm with a threshold of 80% for 5 minutes.

Question 15

A company runs SAP NetWeaver on AWS and uses an Auto Scaling group for the application servers. The operations team wants to ensure that when an instance is terminated, it is first deregistered from the SAP system and any active user sessions are gracefully ended. Which combination of steps should be implemented?

Accepted Answer

Configure a lifecycle hook on the Auto Scaling group to put the instance in a terminating:wait state, and use an Amazon EventBridge rule to invoke an AWS Lambda function that runs the SAP deregistration script.. Auto Scaling lifecycle hooks are designed to pause instance termination, allowing you to perform custom actions such as SAP deregistration and session cleanup. By combining a terminating:wait hook with an EventBridge rule and Lambda function, you can automate the process reliably. This ensures that the instance is properly removed from the SAP system before it is terminated.

Answer

Configure an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that triggers when the instance is marked for termination, and use an AWS Systems Manager Automation document to deregister the instance.

Answer

Enable termination protection on the instances and manually deregister them before allowing termination.

Answer

Use an Auto Scaling group with a launch template that includes a user data script to deregister the instance on shutdown.